Episcopus vagans
Brian Masters
The Elder Brother: A Biography of Charles Webster Leadheater Gregory Tillett (Routledge & Kegan Paul £12.50)
What should one make of a man whose powers of clairvoyance enabled him to depict a human heart as a large, over-ripe tomato; who was present at the disap- pearance of Atlantis and gave the casualty figures as 65 million dead in 24 hours; who could see thoughts and described them to artists who painted them; who averred that the human race had come from Mars and would eventually pass on to Mercury, save for the most advanced, himself among them, who had come from the Moon; who concocted elaborate genealogies of previous incarnations stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, one of which demonstrated that Julius Caesar had somehow been married to Jesus Christ? A harmless, simple-minded fool, perhaps, whose daft views might claim the attention of lonely old women and the most retarded infants. Not so. C. W. Leadbeater was such a man, and even today he has followers who believe he was the wisest and most saintly creature who ever lived. They are livid that anyone should dare write a biography of him, and in their hysteria have thrown all sorts of nasty thought-forms at Mr Gregory Tillett. Fortunately, Mr Tillett has not been deterred. Nor, to his great credit, has he been bullied into bias. His scrupulous account of this influential man is the first truthful biography of a subject normally obscured by clairvoyant clap-trap.
The poor son of a Manchester book- keeper, Charles Leadbeater became a hum- ble village curate in Hampshire until the death of his mother in 1882, when he felt the pull of spiritualism in his loneliness. He was theologically ignorant, a disadvantage which predisposed him in favour of the oc- cult world, where you could solve mysteries simply by making up solutions clairvoyant- ly. Leadbeater quickly became a power within the Theosophical Society alongside Mrs Besant, and ultimately its reigning seer.
Leadbeater's supremacy was due to his many books, wherein he explained tricky occult concepts in a clear language which won converts, and to his overbearing cer- tainty. It was questionable whether he understood what he was saying some of the time, but the fact that he said it made it true, for he was in direct contact with the Solar Logos (i.e. God) with whom he chat- ted regularly. His Master in the astral plane passed messages to him which he relayed to the faithful, who did not mind that the numbers of the Inner Government of the World spoke in exactly the same style as Leadbeater himself, and invariably con-
firmed his own opinions; his clairvoyance therefore caused him no anguish.
Leadbeater's unstoppable career was on- ly temporarily interrupted by two great follies. The first was to allow his teaching of the young to look remarkably like pederas- ty. He always had a pubescent boy with him in bed at night, and another in his bath. It was said that he taught them, for occult reasons of course, things they ought better to have found out for themselves. Police in- vestigation produced evidence of hanky- panky, but the Theosophists, after initial embarrassment, put it all down to Misunderstanding or calumny, and Leadbeater went on with his rapid succes- sion of catamites. 'The average doctor', he wrote, 'cannot see the horrible astral effects Of perpetual desire.'
His other booby was to predict the Com- ing of the World Teacher incarnate. The World Teacher was (is?) the Lord Maitreya, who had twice taken over the body of one of his pupils to be manifested in the world. On the first occasion he appeared as Sri Krishna in India, on the second as Jesus in Palestine. He was now returning for a third go, and Leadbeater spotted the boy who was to be the Vehicle. He was an Indian lad called Krishnamurti, a dim-witted urchin whom the Theosophical Society captured and educated against the wishes of his bewildered father. Presented as the incarna- tion of the World Teacher, the poor child was treated with awe and reverence. He was Leadbeater's own discovery, and the con- firmation of his ominiscient power. He said he had been attracted by 'the size and beau- ty of the boy's aura', and one has to belive him as Krishnamurti was at the time puny and miserable, with only his aura to recom- mend him. When he grew up, he turned on his educators and repudiated them as a bunch of cranks. Leadbeater commented, 'The Coming has gone wrong.'
Despite these setbacks, 'the world's greatest occultist and psychic' went on to enjoy episcopal status in the Liberal Catholic Church, his followers in no way discouraged by his habit of getting almost everything hopelessly wrong. Krishnamurti began his own more sensible philosophical school, which now has world-wide adherents, and found it painful to be reminded that Leadbeater ever existed. To sonic, he was a fiend and a hypocrite. But to most of us he is an unseen influence, for we now use words, originally occult, which were made current by him: astral plane, Psychic powers, vibrations, karma, reincar- nation. His pictures of thought-forms have influenced modern art. His clairvoyant in- spection of the atom is not entirely out of tune with later scientific discovery. Mr Tillett examines all the evidence fairly and thoroughly, impartial to an admirable degree, and treating fanciful occult ideas With sober seriousness. He struggles to sup- press his own sense of humour, mercifully Without total success. His generous conclu- sions he saves until the last chapter, by which time the reader has had as much as he can take of Bishop Leadbeater.
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